Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

nafex - Re: [NAFEX] pond irrigating

nafex@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "road's end farm" <organic101@linkny.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] pond irrigating
  • Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 10:50:27 -0400


On Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 07:45 AM, del stubbs wrote:

Rivka, (and anyone else) I noticed in your last post you mentioned you irrigate from a pond. We have a new 1.5 acre pond 100 feet away and 10' below our orchard. Haven't found a tank yet. Have a gas powered trash (centrifugal) pump - am hoping it can lift 15'. So am curious how you irrigate.....from a tank? drip? how do you control algae, duckweed and other matter from contaminating lines and nozzles etc? thanks,Del

The pond here is uphill from the fields under cultivation, and gravity gives enough pressure for drip irrigation without a pump; the limited water supply here makes drip a better choice than overhead in any case.

The inlet at the pond is a PVC pipe with holes drilled in it, to prevent large objects from getting into and clogging the underground PVC pipe that runs for the first several hundred feet. At that point I attach a disc filter, which seems to be enough for the amount of material that's in the water from this pond. If you have a lot of stuff in your water, a sand filter setup might be better, but they're more expensive. From the filter the system goes to 2" layflat hose, from that to 1 1/2" bluestripe headers along individual field edges; drip tape for each row hooks into that with a shutoff valve for each line, as I often have more than one crop with different water needs in the field. Individual line shutoffs are also handy when leaks occur, you can just shut off the one line you're working on.

Mostly I'm irrigating vegetables and strawberries. For orchards, with the much wider plant spacings, you'd probably use lines with emitters of some sort at each tree, instead of drip tape.

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page